Art Train Conductor No.9

Art Train Conductor No.9 is a moving-mobile-public-art-project existing as visual design on the surface of a GO Train car, with an accompanying smart phone application: tetAtet. Commissioned by No.9 and created by multi-disciplinary artists Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins, this project brings awareness to issues and opportunities relating to mobility, public transportation, urban planning, and sustainability in the greater Toronto and Hamilton area. The app provides a free online public forum for the discussion of these important environmental issues.

Art Train Conductor No.9 includes a dynamic exterior and interior surface-wrapped GO train car. The design of the train-wrap refers to artistic abstraction, and camouflage in the natural world, as well as camouflage in the historical military sense, that of dazzle painting — and the role that pattern and abstraction play as a form of protecting, hiding, and cloaking explicit reality. Within a contemporary context, these visual styles take on the form of a digital visual language, and symbolize a reality that is augmented through virtual space. 

The tetAtet touch-based app is integrated with the visual style of the train wrap and functions as an entertaining forum for debate. Through an integrated Twitter feed, GO riders will be able to respond to issues raised in a collection of video clips featuring a cross section of diverse and informed individuals from the Toronto area and beyond speaking exclusively within the tetAtet forum. The video segments focus on subjects such as intelligent urban planning, strengthening the public voices of individual citizens, environmental concerns, mobility, sustainable living, and building sustainable cities. What is exciting about this project is that a public service for mobility has now also become a forum for public debate.